


A Luxury No One Deserves

by ballantine



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Afterlife, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Post-Series, background flinthamilton, background silvermadi, shove-people-in-a-room therapy, trippy shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-10-14 08:13:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10532460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: John Silver finally confronts his past.





	1. The End

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this about half-way through Season 4, just about when Billy was starting to really break my goddamn heart. (I get the feeling I'm in an extreme minority for still caring about him, but oh well.)
> 
> I've had to change it some since everything (especially the finale), but I don't know how else to cope with the show ending than writing, so... here we go.

_The Reason, the master – on this you must concentrate. Now that your hairs are grey, let it play the part of a slave no more, twitching puppetwise at every pull of self-interest; and cease to fume at destiny by ever grumbling at today or lamenting over tomorrow._

Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_

 

 

He knows nothing for a long time – floats, formless and without thought or memory. Life moves on without him, because that's what it always does.

But gradually, this freedom starts to dim. Darkness arrives, creeping in around the edges and giving the world shape from the contrast.

He blinks and squints and only then becomes aware that he possesses eyes with which to do so. With this discovery, others cascade into place; a mouth presses tight in confusion; fingers bend and ball into fists; legs shift restlessly.

(Leg _s_?)

A name surfaces, and John sits up.

The ocean rolls in and out in front of him. Low tide, his mind supplies automatically. White tipped waves of brilliant, warm blue, and abruptly, even though one sandy beach looks much like another, he knows what must sit at his back. It's a solid feeling, this knowledge. He doesn't know where it comes from, but he doesn't question its truth.

 _Get it over with_ , his thinks. And then, immediately: _fuck you_ , because he started being of two minds about everything once long ago and was never able to attain reconciliation thereafter.

He moves to stand, hand going out for a crutch that is not there, and all of his earlier confusion comes rushing back. He stares down at the two whole legs splayed out before him. He has yet to understand anything that is happening, but it is this part that has him suddenly afraid.

Finally, he moves. Slow and careful like one of the legs might detach itself and get left behind if he goes too fast. But his left leg responds to his unconscious commands as naturally as his right. When he climbs gingerly to his feet, it holds his weight.

John looks away from the leg and up once more at the eternally approaching ocean. He makes himself feel the warm breeze on his face, smell the humid salt air. At last he turns around to face whatever shore he has fetched up on like a piece of useless driftwood.

(He knows. He already knows. He knew as soon as he knew enough to remember his own fucking name.)

Nassau-as-it-was stretches out before him.

And then it's either lock his knees or let them tumble him back down to the sand.

–

The first thing he discovers is that the city is empty. Unnaturally empty. There are no people (no _bodies_ ), no sounds nor smells. In short, it's only the bones of Nassau, long since picked bare of any scraps of meat. There is only John, walking through the silent streets like a beetle might crawl from a bleached eye socket.

“What purpose does this serve?” he asks the air.

 _Maybe it's judgment for misdeeds_.

_That was so long ago._

_But how long ago?_ John tries to remember his death – for surely he _is_ dead, and this twisted illusion is supposed to serve as some manner of afterlife. His memories provide nothing helpful: he sat down for his supper and had a light drink afterwards. It was a mundane evening remarkable only for the fact that it was apparently his last.

He doesn't know how long he walks. His legs do not tire, and so he keeps going. Eventually he thinks he must have charted the whole of the city, and so he has little to do except start branching out into the countryside.

He also seems to possess neither hunger nor thirst. Small mercies.

While his body is held in a curiously suspended state, the island is not; as he leaves Nassau behind, the afternoon begins to shift to evening. The sky deepens to a mesmerizing canvas of purples and reds, and he finds himself angling his head up so that he may watch it.

He doesn't know where he is going, but eventually the road he's been following leads to a small cottage, neatly tended. And through its windows, stealing his breath and giving him a hope he did not know he possessed – the light of a lantern.

His miraculous legs quicken their pace. He's walking fast – he's running – the lit window his only point of focus. He reaches the door and fumbles for the latch. Finally throws it open with a bang, and then stands framed in the doorway looking in.

His smile is stillborn.

Inside, the two figures seated at the table turn to look at him.

“Hell, then,” Flint pronounces after a moment, tone casual like he's predicting rain.

Billy immediately thumps the table with an open hand. “No, Purgatory.”

Flint scowls at him. “Oh, so now you're a Papist?”

“What the fuck is this,” John says in a breath.

Flint flicks his eyes to him. “That's what we're debating. Do try to keep up.”

This cannot be real. One could search through all the realms back to the beginning of time and not come up with two individuals John would less want to keep company with. And yet here they are, conjured up from death as wraiths to haunt him.

Like Nassau and John himself, they both look like men in their prime. Billy is tall and whole, not the aging, liver-spotted wreck he surely died as. And Flint perhaps looks even a little younger than when John knew him – hair long and tied back in a neat queue, face clean-shaven. After a moment, John realizes this is what he must have looked as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. The combination of the youthful face and Flint's customary stern expression is downright unsettling.

It's then that John notices that they appear to be sharing a pot of tea; two cups sit before them on the table, the delicate pretty porcelain making their scarred sailor hands look absurd in comparison.

“This isn't happening,” John says. He turns decisively to leave the cottage but stops on the doorstep.

There is – nothing outside. The beautiful dusky sky, the wavering fields of rich grasses and tall trees, the beaten road. It's all gone. In their place is a thick white fog, so solid in appearance it looks like it could smother a man.

“It's disappeared for you, hasn't it?” Flint says, drawing John's eyes once more. “It seems to do that, once you enter the cottage.”

He shoves back from the table and walks over to fetch another cup from a kitchen shelf. He pours more tea and sets the cup on the table in front of a third seat between he and Billy. John stares at it like he's been offered poison.

“I should have stayed on the beach,” he says, mostly to himself.

Billy looks at him sharply. “You were on the beach? I woke up in the whorehouse.”

“Well, at least we know God has a sense of humor,” Flint says and drinks his tea.

John moves his left arm, and realizes he has been trying to communicate his annoyance with a crutch that is no longer there. He shakes his head. “When does the fog dissipate? Morning?”

“It never left for me after I first arrived,” Billy says.

“And I woke up here, and have yet to see anything else,” Flint adds. He watches Silver, too-observant. “Are you going to sit down?”

John doesn't have to think about it. “No.”

He resolutely ignores them and walks past the table, down the hall, and into one of the bedrooms. He takes care to slam the door behind him. But it's all for nothing; he can still hear them talking in the other room.

“I think that was your room,” Billy says.

“Hardly the first thing he's stolen something from me.”

“If anyone has a right to be bitter here, I think it's me.”

“Do you really want to start this up again?”

“What else is there to do? We already tried killing each other.”

John sits on the edge of the bed, letting the back and forth of their painfully familiar voices flow over him. Outside the bedroom window, the unsettling white fog presses up against the glass. It's all so suffocating.

He ends up curled on the bed, pillow over his ears. He isn't tired, but still prays for sleep.


	2. Settling In

Minutes or hours pass, but the dim grey light from the fog outside does not change. Eventually he gets up and yanks the curtains together to cover the glass. The room thereafter looks like it is perpetually on the edge of a drizzly morning, and the charade is enough to convince his body to slip off to sleep.

His awareness, honed from a lifetime of precarious positions and company, resurfaces the instant Flint enters the bedroom.

He couldn't say how he knows it is Flint, since he refuses to so much as shift a muscle to glance over. But Billy had said it was his room, and he can't picture him swapping to spare either Flint or John the awkwardness of sharing. John thinks, we've shared close quarters before and when we were much younger men. He thinks, this won't be a problem.

The other man in the room doesn't say anything. John hears him pull off his belt and boots and drop them on the floor beside the bed. The mattress sinks a little, as he lies down along the far side.

Then there is a tug on the sheets beneath his body, and John goes rigid, body awash with awareness and heat.

An exasperated noise issue from behind him. Definitely Flint. “You're lying on the blanket.”

Still not looking over, John wordlessly lifts up his body so that the article in question may be slid out from beneath him. He waits for – he doesn't know. A private word, maybe, softened by the pseudo darkness of the room. He waits for a long time.

But then minutes go by, and he realizes that not only has Flint fallen asleep, but he's taken the entirety of the blanket with him.

A chill has settled over the room, but he'll be damned if he's going to cuddle up to James Flint for warmth.

(He chooses to ignore the evidence that he apparently _is_ damned.)

–

When John wakes up again, he is free of the usual aches and pains of old age that he'd become almost accustomed to dealing with in his later years. There's an alien warmth and weight to the mattress that indicates he isn't alone, a rare enough occurrence. He's nigh on blissful until he opens his eyes and finds himself nose-to-nose with a preternaturally youthful Flint.

He flails backwards and falls off the bed, then freezes whilst on the floor, praying that the other man did not awaken at the commotion.

After half a minute of silence, he feels safe in getting up. Carefully not looking at Flint, not wanting to see if he was awake and silently judging from the bed, he leaves the room.

In the main room, the fog is still awaiting him outside the windows. And inside, Billy. He is at the table again, cup at his elbow and by all appearances occupying himself by staring broodingly out the window at the fog. Their eyes meet.

John begins, “Billy – ”

“Don't call me that,” he says quickly, looking up at him. “I haven't gone by that name in decades, and I'd just as soon not start again.”

John says lightly, “Fine.” He thinks he's never going to remember to avoid the name, though. Not with that face staring at him all day long.

It's a funny thing, his memory in this strange place – if you'd asked him before he woke up here, he would've honestly said he could not remember what either Billy or Flint looked like. Not beyond general descriptors that held no real substance. Remembering that Billy was _tall_ was not the same as remembering how he used to tilt his head down _just so_ as he listened to you speak. Remembering that Flint's eyes were green was not the same as knowing how it feels to stand in their sharp path and be completely and utterly understood.

John looks away from Billy and casts about the kitchen for a distraction. After a few minutes of opening cupboard doors and peering at darkened shelves, he asks, “Is there nothing to drink in this place?”

“No,” Billy says, sounding much aggrieved. “Just the tea.”

John hadn't been entirely serious in the question, but now he's brought up short. “Wait – truly? No rum, no – _nothing_?”

All he gets is a shake of the head in return.

John contemplates the near future, trapped in this small cottage with two of the most frustrating men ever to have lived and no alcohol with which to comfort his nerves.

“You get used to it,” Billy offers after a moment.

“ _Do_ you?” John says, who'd heard from Black Dog what sort of state the other man had been in when he found him in that wretched little cove inn.

They lapse into a prickly silence after that.

–

After a short stretch of time – who knows how long, for time is John's enemy now, time is _meaningless_ – Flint finally emerges once more from the bedroom.

John, overcome by then with an intolerable mixture of boredom and grief, has to fight not to stare.

Flint's white shirt is carelessly untied at the neck, his feet bare. He takes the two of them in with an indifferent glance that somehow stings more with the apparent youth of the face delivering it. Then he pours himself a cup of tea and settles in an armchair next to the unlit fireplace. Without comment, he picks up a book and begins reading. He is, to all appearances, perfectly content.

John stares across the room at him, incensed.

“You have to wait until after lunch,” Billy says.

It takes John a moment to realize he is being addressed again. “What?”

“He reads until lunch,” Billy says. He lifts a hand and draws a finger through the condensation on the cottage window. Whatever lay on the other side of the cottage walls, it is much colder than John remembers Nassau ever being. “Arguing has to wait until then.”

“Arguing?” John says.

But Billy just gives him an insulting look and returns to contemplating the fog.

–

As it turns out, Billy is perfectly accurate in his prediction; at lunch they eat the bread, cheese, and grapes that appear in the larder and afterwards make the cottage windows shake with the force of their yelling.


	3. The Map

John would be lying if he claimed that he hadn't thought of what he'd say to James Flint if he ever saw him again – and he did just that, for _years_. Claimed he'd laid the man to rest in his memory as if he were actually dead, long before he really was.

In his private thoughts, the man wasn't so easily banished. Of course John thought about him. Some days, he'd thought of little else: apologies he'd give, arguments he'd use. John didn't even win the arguments. Seemed like Flint had an innate upper hand even as a mental projection.

Of course, reality isn't nearly so forgiving. When the argument really mattered, John had won. No amount of fantasizing could ever change that.

“It goes away,” Flint says.

John twists around. “What?”

Flint gestures carelessly at John's bloodied face. “The injuries. This mess.” He nudges a broken chair with his foot. Billy had tried to smash it over his head ten minutes previous; Flint had eeled out of the way, leaving John to catch a solid oak leg to the jaw.

John dabs at his bloody mouth. “What do you mean, it goes away?”

“It all fades. In a little while, this room and everything in it will look like the fight never even occurred.”

John studies Flint’s swelling eye. “I find that prospect oddly unsatisfying.”

Across the room, Billy snorts in agreement.

Flint tips his head in a motion that's both a shrug and a nod. “Can't argue over the convenience though. Hard to drink tea with broken crockery.”

John says, “I see your priorities have shifted considerably since I last saw you.”

Flint goes still. But after a brief moment, he shakes off whatever emotion had captured him. “All of our priorities have. Look at Billy.”

“He's tried to kill you at least once since I've been here,” John says, and he's irritated with himself to hear the words come out bitter. Even after all this time... and now, when it doesn't even matter because _they're all dead anyway._ “Forgive me if I don't agree that his priorities have shifted to any discernible degree.”

“If we're going to hold murder against each other,” Billy says, stepping forward once more from where he'd been nursing a broken arm, “why don't we start with _him._ He killed Gates and so many more of our men. Back when it actually mattered.” He turns and looks directly at John. “Or why don't we talk about _you_ , and how you killed me?”

Flint's only response to this diatribe had been to look vaguely bored, like he'd heard it all countless times before. But at the last accusation, his eyebrows shoot up and he looks at John in faint surprise.

“I didn't kill you,” John says, more confused than offended.

“You put out a black spot on me.”

And John can't help it; his mouth involuntarily quirks up into a grin. He remembers handing out Billy’s black spot. He thought it funny, and sure enough, it had received a good laugh in the tavern in Bristol.

Privately, the humor had a dark cast to it; he’d managed by then to blame Billy for all of it — for his fucking Long John Silver concoction, for his machinations and all the Nassau murders put to John's name. For the disastrous turn the war had taken for the maroon-pirate alliance.

By then, years and years later, he couldn’t think of a man more deserving of the death sentence so favored by the famed Long John Silver and Avery before him.

John says, “The way young Jim put it, you died a shambling old wreck who couldn't go twelve hours without putting mouth to bottle." He shakes his head. "I didn't _kill_ you, Billy. You killed yourself.”

He watches in spiteful satisfaction as that hits the other man. Then he continues, “And none if it had to happen, if you'd just handed over that fucking map. I mean – it's not like you even had plans in place to use the damn thing.”

A muscle jumps in Billy's jaw, and he opens his mouth to argue, but John doesn't give him the chance. He can't – he's stoked his anger up again. It's something that just seems to happen now around these two men, regardless of any good intentions.

Time for Round Two, John supposes.

“And you,” John says, rounding on Flint, who'd been watching the exchange with detached interest but whose gaze now sharpens. “How many times does a man have to try to kill you before you cease entertaining his company?”

“If I stopped associating with people who'd at some point wanted me dead, I'd never have anyone to talk to,” Flint points out. Then he pauses and adds loyally, “Except Thomas and Miranda.”

Of course, John thinks. He remembers a time where it had been a private joke between the two of them: _if it's any consolation, I haven't thought about killing you for months_ _._

“So you let bygones be bygones and share a drink with an old crew mate. I don't see how that turns into you drawing him a fucking map to the treasure after more than a decade of keeping it secret.”

Amazingly, Flint has the gall to actually look incredulous. “After all this time, is it really the _map_ that bothers you the most?” He pauses. “And how did you even _know_ about it?”

“How did _I_ – ?”

John slams his hands down on the table hard enough to make it shake. Poor thing already has a loose leg from being knocked about in the fight earlier and isn't likely to take another hit before falling apart completely. He sympathizes.

Flint glares over at Billy. “I wouldn't have given you the damn thing if I knew it was going to become an object of interest to the whole of the fucking Atlantic.” _Object of interest to John Silver_ is the unspoken translation.

“I don't understand why you gave it to him at all,” John says through gritted teeth.

“Thomas asked him to,” Billy says quietly from the corner, and it throws John completely.

In dredging up his old faculties for navigating Flint and Billy's tense relationship, it has not occurred to him that there would be a new factor to consider: Thomas Hamilton, the mythic sainted lover. Had he been able to hold together the bloody gash between them? Did he finally heal what John had tried so hard and failed to? Their current status would suggest not, and _yet_ – the map.

“And why would he do that?” John asks calmly, not letting any of his feelings reach his voice.

“Oh – he _liked_ him.” Flint waves a disgruntled hand at Billy. “It was all over as soon as he mentioned his upbringing. Thomas always had a weakness for the levellers. He'd have invited them over to his London salons, if Miranda hadn't bade him to think for once of the impropriety of such a mixed scene.”

“I wasn't lying about what I said I wanted to do with the money,” Billy says suddenly, clearly reading something in Flint's tone.

John cannot divine his meaning, but he knows the bitter twist Flint's mouth takes on as he looks down at his own hands and their restless fingers.

“You show up in Savannah and peddle pretty lies for Thomas while I lay there dying. I don't know whether to kill you for taking advantage or thank you for distracting him.”

Billy presses his lips together and looks away. Resumes staring hard out at the fog.

“So Thomas is still alive?” John asks after a moment.

He hadn't heard what became of him after Flint passed. But then, John hadn't felt particularly motivated to look at the time.

“He is.” Flint's voice is rich with satisfaction, and it makes something in John's chest clench a little to hear. “Or he was, last I drew breath.”

“Oh. I'm glad.” And he truly was, somewhere deep down.

Who knows if it was still the case, of course – Flint had died some ten years before John did. But if Thomas was dead, why wasn't he here in the cottage? And for that matter, why is it just the three of them here when so many countless others had been lost?

John thinks, if it's a question of unfinished business, why isn't _she_ here, hurling accusations across the room at him?

Perhaps she's still alive. Maybe she still has a chance – a better one, surely, now that John is gone for good.

The fire's gone out of the fight again; they all seem to sense it and back away accordingly. But it's only after they lapse into silence for a few minutes that John notices it's not the only thing he senses.

Something is coming.

He looks around, but the other two don’t react at all. He can’t tell if it’s because they don’t feel anything or are simply used to whatever it is.

The fog outside the windows darkens like gathering thunderclouds. A low, dreadful wailing sounds off; it starts quiet, like wind through distant tree branches, but steadily gains in volume until it could be coming from someone standing on the doorstep. Soon it grows so deafening that Flint and Billy finally grimace.

John takes a hesitant step forward.

The wailing is steady on the surface. But when John focuses harder, it somehow starts to become layered with rhythmic multitudes — the sound of a child trying to stifle his crying in a dark, crowded room; a pack of wild dogs howling in gleeful hunt; a man's echoing screams as an axe is brought down on his leg; the sound of cannon fire whistling through the air seconds before it hits; a woman sobbing as she gives birth to something that's too still, too _quiet_ —

His nerve breaks. “What the fuck is it?”

But then he blinks and startles backwards.

The wailing is gone. The fog is again a bright white. John looks around wildly, because – just as Flint had promised earlier – the room is once more set to rights. Even his jaw has stopped aching. John reaches up to touch his lip and his fingers find no blood.

“You get used to it,” Flint says.

He steps forward to the cupboard and hooks three cups down with his finger and thumb. Billy moves past John and begins to stoke up a fire to heat the water for tea. John watches them, still shaken.

“So that’s it?" he asks, voice on the verge of cracking. "We’re supposed to, what, fight and hurt each other and then just sit down for tea – and do it all over again tomorrow? For how long? _Forever_?”

“Do you have a better idea?” Billy asks over his shoulder.

“Yes,” John says. “We leave.”

And with that, he strides over to the door to the cottage.

Flint spins around and jerks a hand up as if to pull him back, but lets it drop almost as quickly. He watches and says nothing as John puts his hand on the knob and yanks the door open.

It no longer looks like fog, now that he's staring at it with no barrier.

Fog is heavy. Damp. It has a smell and distinct feel. The white wall standing inches away from John now is just – nothing. It doesn't contain silence so much as the impression that sound itself never existed. And it's cold. Very cold.

Despite everything within the cottage that should motivate John forward, he finds he cannot bear the thought of taking another step.

Without looking over at Flint or Billy, John steps back and closes the cottage door once more. Then he stands there, looking dully at the wood grain. After a while, he can hear the other two pour their tea and move to sit at the table. If he was to turn around, the image would probably look exactly as it did when he first saw them the day before.

“This is hell,” he says to the cottage door.

Behind him, Flint says to Billy, “There. That’s two against one.”

Billy makes a scoffing noise. “This isn't the Walrus. You don't get to vote on the afterlife.”

John closes his eyes. The bright white of the fog in the nearby windows turns the inside of his eyelids vaguely red, and it's like having the sun shine down upon him.

 _Almost_.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've seen some tumblr posts stating that Steinberg et al said Thomas died first, leaving Flint alone in his dotage and, well ...fuck that, I guess? 
> 
> I'm of the unshakable opinion that anything not actually contained in a show is apocryphal at best. Or in other words: I don't care what shit gets said in interviews after the fact. Let's just call it the JKR Rule.


	4. The Body

The other two are at a distinct advantage, John thinks; they've become accustomed to this bizarre scenario, even with its unique mixture of mind-numbing inactivity and twisted set dressing.

They can apparently weather the constant salt-in-an-open-wound that is the others' presence and the haunting echoes of their past – it cannot just be him that heard whatever that nightmare noise was, but perhaps that's just desperate presumption on his part.

He has spent the past few hours sitting in the corner with his head determinedly in his hands, but eventually he tires of the pose. It's only after he takes his leave of the main room that he gets some indication that the other two are not as unaffected by their present circumstances as they had led him to believe.

It would not be surprising if the other two resumed arguing, but that's not what they do. The truth is far more disconcerting; as he slips down the hall and into the bedroom, he hears them simply start to _talk_.

“So that answers that question, then,” Billy says.

“...You'll have to clue me in.”

“Like you weren't thinking it? Fine.” A sigh. “That really is Silver. I thought, when he first appeared – well. Who knows how this all works?”

The thought puts cold fingertips against John's throat. He would know if he was not himself, surely?

“I assumed he was as real as you,” Flint says, and something in John is viciously pleased about that. He does not care to investigate why.

“Given that you didn't speak to me for two days after I first arrived, that's not particularly comforting. Do you still question my authenticity?”

After a moment, during which John finds himself pressing closer to the bedroom door despite himself, Flint says heavily, “No. That wouldn't make sense. If you were a figment of my own making, you'd be far more aggravating – ”

“Oh _really_? And Silver?”

It takes a while for Flint to reply to that. John almost thinks he won't, and he hovers in the doorway of the bedroom, not wanting to take another step in case he misses something. When Flint does speak again, John wishes he hadn't bothered.

“He'd be angrier with me.”

“Seems plenty angry,” Billy comments.

“Yes. But it's not me he's angry with,” Flint says, unnervingly sure. “And that's how I know it's really him.”

John rears back from the unexpected barb. There's no one to watch him as he determinedly turns and paces back, but his tread might be obvious even from the other room – he can't seem to stop from putting his weight on his right leg, and the uneven sound would be unmistakable to either of them.

–

He doesn't try to sleep immediately. It's still too early, not that he can tell from the unchanging light in the windows. He judges from the feeling of his body, but even that is subject to inaccuracies. His mind is old and set in grooves, expecting fatigue that this young body easily fends off.

Eventually there is shuffling from the hallway and Flint enters the room. John looks over, but is roundly ignored.

He is prepared for this to go as it had the previous night. But all his careful considerations evaporate when Flint stops in the middle of the room and begins to strip down, as if he does not have an audience a mere five feet away, as if this room was filled with summer heat and not autumnal chill.

The behavior is so bizarre, John can't help but watch him and catalog the similarities and differences: the thighs are the same, thick from years spent aloft since adolescence. But his torso is alien in its trimness and only hints at how it will take on a more solid shape in later years. Then Flint drops his drawers and he looks away altogether.

He addresses the window. “Is this belligerent undressing your way of claiming the room for yourself, or — ?”

He risks a glance and finds Flint finally looking at him. John keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the other man’s face and the cool, unreadable expression he sees there.

“It makes no difference to me what you do.” He sounds sincere, but then, he always did. Used to be, John could parse when he was lying, but he’s sorely out of practice. The face in front of him is just unfamiliar enough to dissemble with ease.

Also, John’s somewhat distracted.

“I’m not going to sleep in the other room,” he warns.

“I don't believe I asked you to,” Flint says. He has turned his attention to folding his clothing, so that it will be in a neat stack when he reaches for it in the morning. That's assuming, John thinks with a faint edge of hysteria, that the man has not decided to forsake them altogether and devote his afterlife to nudism.

He's not sure why he is reacting this way; it not like the body he sees before him is _real_.

Flint’s real body is moldering in some poorly marked cemetery outside Savannah, keeping the company of paupers and thieves.

John went to see the gravesite once; the plot itself was a neatly tended rectangle of young grass and held no adornment outside a small wooden cross. Carved simply into the wood: James McGraw.

He’d thought on the short journey over that he’d be curious to look for Thomas Hamilton, if he was still alive. Finally meet the man. But somehow the sight of that grave stopped him. Regardless of the quiet dignity it had been accorded by some diligent and dedicated tender – perhaps Hamilton himself – the little plot was destined to be consigned to the oblivion of unrecorded history.

John turned around and left without another thought of visiting Hamilton. He didn’t want to hear about the life of James McGraw. That wasn’t, he realized, what he had been looking for.

Flint wasn’t in that cemetery. And John isn’t sure he’s here in the cottage either.

This morbid train of thought should recall one of his black moods, which were never far out of reach in the last few years of his life. Instead, the uncertainty and strangeness of it all shifts his mood an altogether different direction; he finds himself letting his gaze drop as Flint turns his back and walks across the room to the bed.

John's injuries from the midday fight have all miraculously healed, but the lingering restlessness that follows such a brawl has not been so kindly dealt with. Flint and Billy seem to have adapted easily to the stop-start manner of their time here. John cannot fathom how they do it.

For lack of any proper distraction from the flex of Flint’s backside, he voices this question.

Flint climbs beneath the bed sheet. “I have no interest in conversing with you right now.”

The rejection stings. John thinks he'd managed to converse well enough earlier with Billy, but does not say this out loud. He is sure he would come off as either jealous or mad, and even if he fears he might be a bit of both, he's not about to let on about it.

Nevertheless, an edge takes up residence in his voice as he replies, “Is it so much to ask that you entertain straightforward questions about our existence in this place?”

“You seem to be harboring some mistaken notion that I am not angry with you.”

“You threw a cup at my face earlier,” John says. “It still had tea in it. Hot tea.”

Flint leans up on his elbows so that he can look deliberately over at John. Then he has the gall to _shrug,_ which only spurs John on:

“Of course you’re angry with me. You’re the angriest man I’ve ever _met_ , and it’s not like pirates as a group are known for their even tempers.”

Flint blinks, almost startled, like he’s never heard the accusation before — or maybe just not in many years, John realizes.

It shouldn’t make his heart sink. He tells himself he doesn’t know how to feel about it. An angry Flint is what gave way to a determined Flint, and both were the only ones he’d ever known. And it fit. It did. John had always recognized that Flint’s anger was the most reasonable response to that world they’d inhabited back then, even as he disagreed on practicalities and sought an exit.

Flint tips his head to the side, considering. After a moment, he sighs and says, “I'd like to sleep, so if answering your questions hastens us to that end – ask away.”

John wastes no time. “Why the playacting at having a schedule, the separate days?”

Flint looks almost disappointed by the question, like he thinks the answer should be obvious. “You’ve heard we can’t kill each other. Surely you can deduce the import of that — look around you. How long do you think the three of us will be here?” At John’s uneasy look, Flint sits up and leans forward. The sheets pool around his hips, and the picture of easy debauchery contrasts badly with his next words.

“It's a distinct possibility that we might be here forever, or at least a very long time. Billy and I agreed, for the sake of our respective sanities, that keeping a pretense of normalcy was for the best.” He waves a hand. “If you wish to spend your hours pacing and cursing, by all means. But if it starts to infringe on my own piece of mind, make no mistake: I will take action.”

“To what end?”

“What?”

“If I lose my mind and begin to truly unnerve you two — what can you do to remedy the situation? There won’t be a way to stop me.”

Flint thinks on that. “I suppose – we’ll tie you up. Gag your mouth.”

“And then I’ll scream through it,” John counters.

The look Flint gives him is flatly irritated. “Is this you throwing out possibilities or threats?”

John raises his hands. “I'm just trying to assemble some expectations. Call it a mental map. You have your ways of coping – well, this is mine.”

“Well, cope more quietly, if you please. And pull the curtains – I am going to sleep.”

And he does just that, lying back down and putting his back to the rest of the room.

John shouldn't feel disappointed, but the feeling that overtakes him as he straightens up – because of course he'd started to lean forward, elbows on knees, _engaged_ – is unmistakable. Soundless, he draws the curtains shut, casting the room back into its eerie predawn likeness.

He keeps most of his clothing on, for the room _is_ chilly and he expects to gain little benefit from sharing the bed with another body. He climbs onto the other side.

Flint doesn't move, not to stiffen from revulsion nor to shuffle closer. The only hint that he knows John is even there is that he keeps strictly to his side of the mattress.

John rolls onto his back and stares up into the dimness.

It's a strange feeling that preoccupies him in this bed. He has an uncomfortable awareness of intimacy lost, the knowledge that the person next to him was once so familiar and well-known, his body was a natural extension of every waking moment. His presence, not so much a forgone conclusion as a welcome complement.

Like the phantom sensation of a missing leg, John feels that remnant of comfort in having Flint at his side. But it's a deceitful feeling, and he knows if he were to put weight on it, he would surely stumble and fall.


	5. Trying

Much later, still in bed and spoken quietly so as to preserve the pretense at morning:

“What became of Madi? Will you tell me?”

John blinks slowly at the wall. He is on his side with his back to Flint and hadn't realized the other man was awake. There'd been no change in his breathing, but that could just mean he woke before John did. Or perhaps his sleep is so untroubled these days, the transition to consciousness is easier than it was in the past.

Flint continues, “You reached for your left leg when you woke up, I know you are not asleep.”

His observations always did have an edge of unkindness to them.

John says, “I’m not pretending to be asleep.”

“Then will you answer my question?”

Last night he'd wanted nothing more than for Flint to just talk to him. But not about this. “No.”

John gets up and leaves the room.

—

 _After all this time_ , _i_ _s it really the_ __treasure_ _ _that bothers you the most?_

The words are Flint's construction, but she shared the sentiment. Damningly, John cannot remember the exact words she used back then. If he'd known they would be the last she ever spoke to him, he would have taken more care to listen – but time was short and his window of opportunity even shorter. Skeleton Island and Flint's final secret were out there waiting for him. He could not bear the thought of letting them go a second time.

While he struggled to remember the last thing Madi said to him, he was excruciatingly clear on when he first realized he'd made a mistake in leaving.

He wishes he could say it was on the voyage to the island, but he was too distracted then: an old man reliving the pleasures of the sea breeze and delighted that his capacity to move about a ship on one leg had not diminished. Sure, there had been rough-hewn idiots to manage, but there was also an avid audience in the shape of young Jim Hawkins, who'd listened to his old stories like they were the most fascinating tales he'd ever heard.

And it hadn't been when things had started to fall apart – the ways things always fell apart in that godforsaken place. The pirates he'd filled the Hispaniola rolls with were not Walrus men, not even close. All his careful planning was for nothing when the only tools he had to wield were quarrelsome blackguards with brains too rum-soaked to grasp simple strategy. He'd felt a peculiar but keen sort of sorrow then, as he finally began to understand that the world he'd known was well and truly gone. But no, he hadn't realized his mistake then either.

It had been on that final, grueling overland march towards the treasure.

The superstitious fools surrounding him and the Hawkins lad had grown spooked from following the steps of a dead man. They all started recalling the six men Flint had slain with memory too vivid to be anything but a story's third cousin, twice removed. Having figures and events from his own life bandied about as if they were aspects of a tall tale had not sat right with John, and then Ben fucking Gunn had to sing that song.

He watched the blood drain from the others' faces out of momentary fear that Captain Flint had indeed risen from the grave. And he perceived all at once how completely futile the whole quest had been. It was over. It had been over, he realized, for a very long time.

Madi was gone by the time he returned to Bristol. A forward-looking woman like she understood what he had refused to until it was too late: grasp for a ghost and you'll inevitably come up empty-handed.

–

Whatever novelty the cottage and its inhabitants held the day before has dampened, leaving John thoughtful but silent. When the other two emerge from their rooms, he keeps his gaze averted. He does not try to speak or engage them in any way. Instead, he stares at the cottage door, and lets the silent hours pass as they will.

Once or twice he thinks he notices Flint watching him. The suspicion is hard to confirm without turning his head, which he refuses to do. This leaves him in a state of sour and bitter longing. He wants nothing more than to be able to meet the other man's eyes and see that old awareness and belief, but he knows neither of them are the men they once were.

He can be a patient man. The last years of his life had been made of days like this, full of quiet waiting and no real company but his memories. Easier to bear those memories when there weren't two reminders sitting in the same room as him, but John is sure he merely needs to adjust.

Lunch arrives and the other two get up. John, still formulating a plan for testing the edges of this spectral prison, decides to sit the meal out.

Flint seems to realize what he's doing. Popping a grape into his mouth, he considers John for a moment before saying, “It won't make a difference, you know. We are born anew every day.”

Hell, John thinks again. What else could a place be when change or progress is rendered an impossibility?

“Then why eat at all?” he asks.

Flint and Billy exchange a look. Billy glances back at Silver and shrugs. “Something to do.”

John doesn't respond. He continues to sit in his chair and resumes staring at the cottage door.

This vocation becomes harder to abide by when the other two finish lunch and fall neatly in for their afternoon argument. John's not well trained in ignoring either of them separately, let alone when they are clashing. He finds his gaze tugged continually to where they stand, ears following the familiar beats of their fight like it's an old shanty that once passed the time spent aloft.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, Billy disengages long enough to turn to John and demand, “Have you nothing to add to any of this?”

With some private satisfaction, John slouches down in his seat and crosses his brand new left leg over his other knee. He looks over at them calmly. “I fought yesterday and it didn't fix anything. I don't see any benefit in carrying on and doing it all over again.”

“It was always a calculation of profit with you,” Flint says.

John swallows that whole and bites down on the urge to throw it back up at him. After a moment he says, “As you like. But I'd still choose my own calculations over being the unwilling banner in your war games.” He sees the look on Billy's face and adds, “Both of you. You're both the same. Making choices for other people and then getting angry when it turns out they have a mind of their own.”

Flint steps forward, real anger on his face. “Is _this_ how you have warped events to soothe your conscience? You've made yourself out to be some sort of victim?”

“ _No_ ,” John grits out, and then, look at that: it turns out avoiding arguing is much easier said than done.

 


End file.
